Friday, August 6, 2021

#RPGaDay2021 - Day 6 - Exploration, Old School

The main word for Day 6 of #RPGaDay is FLAVOR.  A lot of possibilities with that, but it was the third word that got my mind wandering in a positive direction: EXPLORE.

I'll keep it simple, I miss classic SWAT-style dungeon crawls.   The influence of minis and GM-created maps for generations of D&D players, 3.0 and higher have improved on the visual, while eliminating some of the old school tacticals I loved as a player, and endorsed as a dungeon master. 

Avoiding situations where we were playing complete neophytes, our experienced parties were smart enough to install a system, a standard operation procedure, for classic dungeoneering. So long as there wasn't a time constraint, we were quick to listen to doors, check locks, search for traps, search again, but this time for secret doors, and of course, dispose of the monsters within with impunity.  Sure, there's a tedium with that, but we were also mapping the dungeon on graph paper as we went.   There's a different interpretation of that fictional reality when you're applying pencil to paper and making the dungeon appear on a map, versus seeing everything it's 3-D or digital glory.   

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